VCR Sparked Home-Video
Revolution
Video recording had a difficult birth. Frank Stanton was
president of CBS in 1970 when the company launched a peculiar playback-only video system
called Electronic Video Recording (but which actually used film). Lamenting the
cancellation of the project two years later, he's reported to have commented: "We
couldn't think of any kind of program to ask people to buy that they couldn't get free on
regular television."
Author Nick Lyons, discussing the recordability of the
Betamax VCR shortly after its introduction, speculated that the reaction of most American
viewers would be "Why should we want to record such dreadful programs?"
Undeniably, though, during the electronics explosion of the
1960s and early '70s, the industry believed that consumers were avidly awaiting some way
to record and play back video images, rather than simply watch them when the broadcasters
chose to run them. Over the years a bewildering array of systems popped up, mostly to
disappear just as quickly. Most never got to market.
Recording a television picture was no simple matter, given
the technology of the day. Tape recorders struggled to handle the 20kHz bandwidth of an
audio signal (most didn't make it), so the 6MHz bandwidth of a video signal -- three
hundred times greater -- seemed an insuperable problem.
For the first decade of commercial television, therefore,
the only way to store a TV image was to make a film by training a camera on the face of a
kinescope monitor tube. These "kinnies" are the only record we have of those old
live shows, which mostly remained live because of the inferior quality of the kinescope
recording process.
Then, in 1956, Ampex Corporation introduced the first
videotape recorder (VTR). It used a technique called "quadruplex" in which,
rather than recording down the length of a tape like an audio recorder, it used tape two
inches wide and recorded across it by means of a spinning disc containing four
heads. The video signal was stored in short, transverse tracks, with audio and
synchronizing information recorded in linear tracks along the edge of the tape.
The original machines were about the size of an upright
piano and carried a price tag of about $100,000 (in 1956 U.S. dollars). I remember taking
a tour of the NBC network facilities in New York later that year and being shown their new
tape center; it had a total of four machines for the whole network.
The advent of the professional VTR did not go unnoticed in
Tokyo, where Sony's founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita were beginning to turn their
attention to video. They were already a significant factor in the consumer audio recording
market, and video seemed to be a natural extension. Sony quickly made an alliance with
Ampex, which would allow the Japanese company access to some of Ampex's patents.
Sony was really only interested in creating a consumer
video recorder that was modest in cost and size. The first machine appeared in 1960, and
while it was nowhere near a match for the Ampex recorder in terms of quality, it was only
a tenth the price. That was still a hefty $10,000, but over the next few years other
models were introduced that were smaller and smaller, and with ever-lower prices. By 1966
they had a machine that sold for $800 and which could record an hour of black-and-white
material on 1/2" tape.
The innovation in Sony's recorders was that they used a
technique called helical scanning, which was much simpler than Ampex's quadruplex. One or
two heads are used, mounted on a drum that is canted slightly, and which the tape is
wrapped around. As the drum spins, the heads write long diagonal tracks on the tape; in
Sony's case, there were two heads, each writing one field.
Ampex took a run at the consumer market that same year,
with a line of helical machines that used a single head and 1" tape. It found some
favor in educational applications, but at $2000 it was too expensive for most consumers,
and it was also extremely bulky. The walnut-clad home version weighed in at about 100
pounds. Color was eventually added, but the Ampex home VTR line was never much more than a
curiosity.
By 1969, Sony had come up with a format that is still
finding use in some quarters today. Called U-Matic, it was the first video format to use a
tape cartridge that could just be shoved in a slot. A special mechanism then reached
inside, drew the tape out, and wrapped it around the head drum, all of which had to be
done manually in earlier machines. The U-Matic machines used 3/4" tape, included
color, and cost $1000. They were an immediate hit in professional applications, but still
out of reach for consumers.
The dawn of the 1970s saw an unbelievable scramble to come
up with a viable consumer video recorder, with practically everybody getting into the act.
RCA, not to be outdone by rival CBS's ill-fated system, came up with the holography-based
SelectaVision, which they quickly changed to a magnetic system but kept the name.
Cartrivision, a one-ended magnetic system in which the tape was drawn into the player, was
actually marketed briefly in the U.S.
Akai, which had been pushing a 1/4" helical system for
several years made an attempt to put that in a cartridge. Panasonic came up with both
1/4" and 1/2" systems. Ampex produced something called InstaVideo, which was
such a flop that the company closed its consumer products division for good.
Once again, Sony broke the logjam by introducing Betamax,
which hit the shelves in Japan in May of 1975. In many ways Beta was just a stripped-down
U-Matic, using the same sort of tape-handling mechanism, but with 1/2" tape and a
much smaller cartridge. One crucial addition was the addition of a TV tuner in the
recorder, which allowed the user to tape one program and watch another.
One of the sorrier episodes in consumer electronics
followed the introduction of Betamax. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and
several studios sued Sony and several of its officers for copyright infringement, on the
grounds that their machine might be used to make unauthorized copies of their
movies. The suit dragged on for years, and was then thrown out, but not before costing
everybody a lot of time and money, and making the Japanese electronics firms eternally
wary of legal threats by American organizations.
The designers of Beta made one fatal error, which
ultimately killed it. They only provided for one hour of recording time, completely
misreading the fact that the primary use consumers would make of the machine was watching
movies. They retooled to correct that, but never regained the momentum.
The following year, JVC -- a subsidiary of Sony's
arch-rival Matsushita -- brought out VHS, with almost identical performance but longer
playing times, and the process of supplanting Beta began. In the end, the movie companies
-- once they'd embraced video -- refused to make duplicate versions of their products, and
Beta died.
There were other rivals in the early days. Philips briefly
pushed its own system in Europe, and Funai made a miniature cassette and mechanism that
was sold here for a while under the Technicolor name. It was the ancestor of the 8mm
camcorder format.
There were cameras for VCRs from the beginning, but they
cost as much as the machines. The equipment was very cumbersome as well, and so were the
machines that were supposed to be portable, so home taping was really a non-starter until
camcorders appeared in the mid-1980s.
In parallel with the development of home videotaping was
the quest for a video disc, even though the various attempts were all playback-only
systems. The first workable one was shown in 1970 by a consortium made up of Germany's
Telefunken and Britain's Decca. The Teldec disc went the rounds of trade shows and
conferences as did Philips's Video Long Playing (VLP) disc, which was demonstrated first
in 1972 but didn't appear on the shelves for a decade as the laserdisc.
By then, both RCA and JVC had their own discs -- CED and
VHD, respectively -- but they died quickly. Laserdisc eventually gained a niche status
with serious videophiles, partly because of its superior picture quality, partly because
of its digital sound, and partly because the player could play CDs as well.
It's probable that everything discussed above will be
obsolete in the face of the stellar performance of the DVD. When a single recordable
standard emerges, that is.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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